ARCHITECTURE We were talking about architecture the other day. Well, I was. Here's another new project, the Velo - it will no doubt be nice to live in, with Amenties and things, but lacks pizzazz:

The rain has passed, it’s twilight, and everyone’s home.

Got a press release on this one, down in the Mill district on the English side of the river. Starting to see a pattern?

Mill & Main. Great views, judging from the website It uses materials common to the area, which is nice, but suffers from the blocky sameness that affects the genre these days. The large windows are nice, and I’m not saying they should all wear an oversized Mansard roof like the craptacular apartments of the late 60s and early 70s, but would it kill you to put a cornice on one of these guys? Back in college a bartender at the restaurant where I worked was an architecture major, and delighted in telling me how he shocked his teachers by putting “An (expletive) hipped roof” on a house for an assignment. So bourgeoise! That’s what it took to be a rebel: make your house look like a 1962 rambler.

Obviously you’re going to want the most floor-space the plot permits. But these designs seem to defeat the possibility of ornamentation - anything tacked on the severe surfaces would just look, well, tacked on, like an I-Beam welded to the side of the Seagrams Building to impart the idea of Miesian purity.

Still, the Seagrams is a pretty handsome building.

Back to column work; see you around.

This blog covers everything except sports and gardening, unless we find a really good link about using dead professional bowlers for mulch. The author is a StarTribune columnist, has been passing off fiction and hyperbole as insight since 1997, has run his own website since the Jurassic era of AOL, and was online when today’s college sophomores were a year away from being born. So get off his lawn.